Second Life Hit By Massive In-Game Worm 249
An anonymous reader writes, "At 2:46 CST today, the game Second Life was hit by a massive attack by a rogue programmer. Spinning gold rings began to appear in the air and on the ground, and as users interacted with them they began to chase and replicate. Apparently, most people are willing to touch an object they've never seen before and this invoked a worm script that was designed to multiply and spread across the 2,700+ servers run by Linden Labs in California, the game's owner. Many of the six hundred thousand active users experienced serious lag and lost connectivity to the servers, making it one of the largest known denial-of-service attacks in an online game. Linden Labs had to invoke martial law and lock out all logins by users except their staff as they began the task of cleaning the servers of what they began to term 'the grey goo.'" Comments in the SL blog entry indicate that Linden Labs had already deployed a "grey goo fence" before this worm struck, but someone found a hole in it.
Not just misleading, but factually inaccurate too! (Score:5, Informative)
First off, there were only about 14,000 people on the system at the time, not 600,000 as indicated in the summary. Second, while they did lock out new logins, it should be pointed out that any user who was currently online was not kicked off - and the period of "martial law" lasted about 20 minutes.
Of course, if there were 600,000 users on at the same time, the "game" would be unplayable - it's tough enough when it gets over about 10,000 right now.
Re:Someone please explain (Score:5, Informative)
Second Life needs a new name (Score:2, Informative)
Linden Labs had to invoke martial law...
Some people seriously need to get a grip. This is all ones and zeroes - comparisons with "martial law" are just silly. Second Life needs to be renamed to give its users a much needed message - namely, Get A Life
This one wasn't much to write home about afaict (Score:2, Informative)
A clarification - even if there are currently ~600k active user accounts there are usually only ~10K or so online any given time of day.
Anyway, I'd say the overreaction to copy bot did more damage to SL as a whole than this thing did.
Yawn.
Re:Someone please explain (Score:5, Informative)
some of the commands let you create/spawn (i cant think of the word they use) other objects, like rain, or stars that follow you as you fly around. These objects in turn can have there own scripts too.
i don't know my self how they normally stop never ending loops of created objects other than them asking people nicely not to do it.
Some people have asked to able to disable the scripts but this, i think would have a to greater effects as every thing, doors, cars, lifts, dance club lights etc use the scripts.
i don't mind it, as long a people remember that its really just a glorified chat program with scripts, ie irc with a gui
Re:Someone please explain (Score:5, Informative)
That is exactly what this worm did.
Re:Screenshots? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And it was just getting good (Score:3, Informative)
dumbest slashdot story ever (Score:2, Informative)
on a related note, why can't we moderate stories as "-1 posted by an idiot"?
Re:PR Stunt? (Score:3, Informative)
An abridged history of SL DoS attacks (Score:3, Informative)
Please (Score:1, Informative)